Yahoo News TV Ratings: Republican Convention Finishes High but Down Slightly Overall vs. 2020
The closing night of the Republican National Convention drew the gathering’s biggest TV audience of the week, one larger than the closing night of the RNC four years ago. It wasn’t quite large enough, however, to push the convention as a whole past 2020’s numbers.
Thursday’s coverage of the convention, running from 10 p.m. to about 12:15 a.m. ET, averaged 25.38 million viewers across 14 outlets, according to Nielsen figures. Most of that time was devoted to Donald Trump’s speech accepting the party’s nomination for president for the third consecutive election. That was up about 7 percent from the final night of the 2020 convention (23.81 million viewers across 13 channels). Nielsen says the audience peaked between 10:45 and 11 p.m. ET, early in Trump’s speech, with 28.4 million viewers.
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For the four nights of the RNC, multi-network coverage averaged 19.07 million viewers, a shade under the 19.39 million average for the 2020 convention. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday’s audiences were all up slightly from four years ago, but a big decline on Tuesday — which, at 14.81 million viewers, was down by 24 percent from 2020 — dragged down the overall average. (Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game also aired Tuesday and may have siphoned off some viewers.)
The vast majority of the audience for Thursday’s coverage — 18.36 million viewers, or about 72 percent of the total — was made up of people over age 55. That’s consistent with the prior three days, when about three-fourths of the audience was from that age range. Just under 5 million people (4.94 million) ages 35-54 watched Thursday, along with 1.35 million adults 18-34 and about 726,000 kids and teenagers.
Fox News led all four nights by sizable margins, including 9.21 million viewers on Thursday. NBC (3.89 million) beat out ABC (2.79 million) for second place on the night, and CNN (1.97 million) took fourth. CBS brought in 1.91 million viewers and MSNBC, 1.19 million. Coverage on Scripps News, Telemundo, Univision, CNNe, Fox Business, Newsmax, NewsNation and PBS accounted for the remaining 4.42 million viewers. (Nielsen’s figures do not include streaming.)
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